Acadian Waltz (19 page)

But before we
turned toward the alleyway that led to the street, one member of the group
raised a gold chalice in her hands.

Unable to tear
my eyes away, I asked, “What’s going on now?”

“That’s their
leader.” Steve pointed to the man wearing the crown of feathers and gold
medallion. “He’s about to drink from the cup of enlightenment, and then he
falls down on the ground and claims to commune with the spirits. It’s bullshit.
Come on, let’s go drinking.” He pulled at my arm.

“No, let’s see
what happens.”

“Are you kidding
me? Honestly, you can see this on HBO any night of the week.”

I directed my
attention to the gold chalice that was being passed around the group. “What’s
in that cup?”

Steve shrugged.
“I don’t know. Wine, drugs, blood, take your pick. These cults seem to be into
anything these days.”

“Where do they
get these people?”

“Nora, anyone
wanting a savior is ripe for these fools. They’re mostly drifters looking for a
home, kids passing through town, people like that.”

“So who is…?” My
question died on my lips when the leader of the group faced me.

First those
black eyes hit me. His dark, wavy hair fell over his right eye, highlighting
the scar on his right cheek. When his eyes met mine, for a moment I could see
the trepidation in them. But being the professional that he was, Henri Gaspard
simply nodded to the young woman beside him, holding the chalice.

“Son of a
bitch,” I whispered.

“What is it?”
Steve queried.

“I know their
leader.”

The young woman
kneeled before Henri Gaspard and held up the gold chalice. Henri patted the
woman’s head, and then raised his eyes to me as if to say, “Look what I can
do.” While smirking at me, he took the cup from the woman’s hands. He walked
back toward the center of the courtyard and lifted the chalice to his lips.
After drinking the contents, Henri slowly put the gold cup down on the edge of
the fountain in front of him.

I turned to
Steve. “Any idea how much your neighbor pays to belong to this group?”

“A hundred bucks
a month. Why?”

Suddenly, Henri
fell hard to the cement-covered ground and started convulsing.

I ran to his
side as Steve followed right behind me. I could hear some of the women in the
group screaming, and as I reached for Henri’s head, a hand grabbed my wrist and
tried to stop me.

“He must not be
touched during the transfer,” a tall man hollered at me with a very thick
accent I could not place.

“Screw your
transfer!” I wrenched the man’s hand away from my wrist. “This man is having a
seizure.” I glanced back at Steve. “Call 911, now.”

Steve pulled his
cell phone from the front pocket of his jeans. As he spoke to the operator on
the other end of the line, a flurry of white robes ran to and fro about the
small courtyard.

“I’ll go and
meet the ambulance out front,” Steve said as he nodded to me. “You all right
with him?”

“Fine,” I
answered. “Go.”

Steve took off
down the alleyway as I held on to Henri. His body twitched and I struggled to
make sure his head did not bounce on the cement beneath him.

“Shh,” I
whispered to him. “Easy, Henri. Nora Kehoe is here. I won’t leave you.” I heard
his breath rattle in his throat and I prayed that he could get enough air until
help arrived.

After what
seemed like an eternity, I heard the sound of sirens coming closer. When I
looked up, the courtyard was completely empty. By the time the medics got to
me, I was still holding Henri’s head, but the seizures had not stopped, and I
began to wonder if they ever would.

*     *     *

I went with
Henri in the ambulance to University Hospital. The medics were not going to
allow me to ride in the front of the ambulance until they found out that I was
Dr. John Blessing’s fiancée.

“Nora, are you
all right?” John shouted as he greeted the ambulance on our arrival at the
emergency room ambulance bay. “You scared the hell out of me. I thought they
were bringing you in for a second when they radioed ahead.” He helped me out of
the ambulance and kissed my forehead. Then he turned to one of the medics.
“What have we got?”

“Non-responsive
forty-year-old male,” the taller of the two medics began to give his report as
he pulled Henri’s gurney from the back of the ambulance. “Had to bag him for
half the ride. Just started breathing on his own a few minutes ago. Don’t have
any idea what he took. We brought the cup we found next to him. Hopefully, it
has traces of the stuff he drank in it.” The medic nodded at me as they
approached the emergency room entrance. “She witnessed the whole thing,” he
added.

I saw John’s
gray eyes turn to me just as the automatic doors to the emergency room closed
behind him. I stayed outside by the ambulance, not wanting to walk into the
emergency room and face him. But moments later, John came back out the
automatic doors and grabbed my arm.

“Do you know
this guy?” he asked, pulling me toward the emergency room entrance.

“His name is
Henri Gaspard. You know him, too. You met him at Lou’s jewelry store a few
weeks ago,” I reminded him.

After going
through the automatic doors, we stopped in a wide, white hallway.

John let go of
my arm. “But why are you here with him?”

“I went to meet
my secretary, Steve, at his place in the Quarter. He invited me to go to a karaoke
bar for drinks. Henri was leading a cult meeting in the courtyard where Steve
lives. Right after I arrived, he drank something from that cup they brought in
and began seizing.” I shook my head. “I told the paramedics you were my fiancé
so I could come to the hospital with Henri.”

John glanced
down the hallway to a pair of red double doors with a sign reading “ER Trauma
Room” posted above them. “I’ve got to get back in there and make sure he’s
taken care of. You’d better get his family here as soon as possible.” His
bleary eyes searched mine and then he said, “When things settle down, you and I
will need to talk about this.” John turned away and headed quickly through the
red double doors.

*     *     *

Hoping to avoid
the inevitable confrontation with John, I had turned down his offer to wait for
Jean Marc in the empty doctor’s lounge, and instead opted to remain among the
myriad of sick and injured in the noisy emergency room waiting area.

It was well
after midnight and I had been sitting on the floor next to a little girl who
had broken her arm while playing in an abandoned house, when a pair of black
leather shoes stepped before me.

My insides
melted as my eyes beheld Jean Marc, leaning over me and wearing a tailored dark
blue suit. His black hair was disheveled and his muscular body looked leaner
than I remembered, but his dark brown eyes still had the same mesmerizing glow.

He reached down
and helped me from the floor. “I was at the airport, getting in from a business
trip, when you called. I got here as soon as I could. Where is he?”

“He’s still
being worked on.” I surveyed the waiting area. “Where’s Ms. Marie?”

“I haven’t
called her yet,” he replied, and then lowered his gaze to my body.

I quickly
realized that the blue jeans and T-shirt I had on only accentuated my weight
loss. By the time his eyes returned to my face, the worry in them was riveting.

“I’ll get John.”
But before I could turn away, Jean Marc grasped my hand.

His touch sent a
shockwave up my arm. Squeezing his hand with all my might, I raised my head and
our eyes locked.

“Is this the
brother?” John asked, appearing beside us.

“John!” I
instantly let go of Jean Marc’s hand. “Ah, yes, this is Jean Marc Gaspard.” I
motioned to Jean Marc. “Jean Marc, this is my fiancé, Dr. John Blessing.”

The two men
curtly nodded at each other.

“Mr. Gaspard,
your brother is being transferred to the intensive care unit,” John stated in
an impersonal tone. “We’re still not sure what he took, but the seizures have
stopped. He’s still not awake, and may not be for several hours yet.”

“Do you have any
idea what happened?” Jean Marc questioned.

“He was leading
some kind of cult in the Quarter, Jean Marc,” I reported, my voice barely
audible above the din of people around us.

Jean Marc’s eyes
flashed with fury. “A cult? So that’s what he’s been up to.”

“That would
explain the strange drugs in his system,” John mumbled. “It could be a form of
Peyote used by the American Indians to induce hallucinogenic trips.”

Jean Marc
furrowed his brow. “You mean like LSD?”

“Similar to it,
but we may never know for sure,” John conceded. “We had a small sample of the
stuff your brother drank sent to the crime lab. But it could be weeks before we
get any results.”

Jean Marc ran
his hands over his face. “What will happen to Henri?”

“Until he comes
around, we can’t determine the extent of damage his brain may have suffered
because of the prolonged seizures.”

“Are you saying
he may have brain damage?” Jean Marc cursed and shook his head. “This is going
to destroy my mother,” he said under his breath.

“I would still
like to know what you were doing at this little cult fest, Nora,” John
whispered to me as he leaned over my shoulder.

“I told you
earlier. I stumbled on the meeting when I went to Steve’s home in the Quarter.
When I saw Henri as the head of the thing, I knew it was some sort of scam.”

“Then why did
you stay?” John demanded, raising his voice to me.

“I wasn’t even
there five minutes when he drank that stuff. Then he started seizing, and what
was I supposed to do?”

Out of the
corner of my eye I saw Jean Marc listening intently to our conversation.

“You are not to
go on any more jaunts to the Quarter without me, Nora.” John ordered.

My anger came
boiling to the surface. “Don’t tell me what to do!”

He pointed at
the floor. “I work here, Nora. I can’t afford to have people think I have a
cult follower for a fiancée.”

“Hey, wait a
minute.” Jean Marc came up to John. “Look, John, Nora is—”

“Stay out of
this,” John barked, turning to Jean Marc.

Jean Marc pointed
at me. “Don’t you speak to Nora that way!”

“Jean Marc,
please,” I implored, putting myself in between the two men.

John glowered at
Jean Marc, expanding his chest like a proud peacock as he spoke. “She is my
fiancée. Don’t tell me how to talk to her.”

“John, shut up,”
I snapped.

“Your fiancée?”
Jean Marc shouted. “You treat all women like that, or only the ones you’re
engaged to?”

“Hey, where do
you get off?” John called out.

Jean Marc
motioned to me. “What have you done to Nora? For Christ’s sake, look at her.
She looks sick! Is that how you like your women?”

“You son of a
bitch.” John pulled back his arm and threw the first punch.

But Jean Marc
was much quicker on his feet and ducked, avoiding John’s fist. Jean Marc
bounced back to his feet and was able to land an expert blow right on John’s
left jaw.

Someone in the
waiting area shouted, “Fight,” and before I knew it, an audience of at least
ten people stood beside me, egging John and Jean Marc on to kill each other. By
this time they were rolling around on the floor, trying to pound each other
with their fists. I screamed for the two men to come to their senses, but I had
seen enough fights in my life to know that once testosterone went into
overdrive, all a woman could do was stand aside and watch, or find an even
bigger guy to break it up.

The bigger guy
came in the form of a mammoth security guard stationed in the waiting area. He
immediately pulled Jean Marc off John’s chest. The thick guard pinned Jean Marc
to him with arms the size of small tree trunks.

“You okay, Doc?”
the security guard asked as John rose from the floor.

John’s left eye
was already swelling and his lower lip was dripping blood on to his green
scrubs. I noticed that Jean Marc did not have a scratch on him.

John held his
hand to his lip. “Let him go, Vincent. It was just a misunderstanding.”

I was scrambling
to think of something to say when a uniformed police officer stepped out from
behind John. He was a scrawny man with a long, pointy face and intense green
eyes.

“I’m Sergeant Yeager
of the NOPD, Homicide Division,” the policeman announced as he spied John’s
bloody lip. “You Henri Gaspard’s brother?” he inquired, turning to Jean Marc.

Jean Marc
stepped forward “Yeah. What is it? Am I under arrest for hitting a doctor?”

“No. Not my
department.” Sergeant Yeager smirked. “I need to speak with you about your
brother, and if you knew of any relationship he had with a….” Sergeant Yeager
glanced down at a notepad in his hands. “Carrie Ann Wendell.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The girl I told
you about,” John stated, while wiping his bloody lip with the back of his hand.
“The one with the muscles cut away around her eyes that came into the ER last
month. She was wearing a white robe and medallion like Henri’s. She was
admitted in almost the same drug induced state as Henri.”

“Except she
died,” Sergeant Yeager chimed in. “We think your brother may have had something
to do with her death.”

“Ah, goddamn
it,” Jean Marc muttered.

“Do you know
anything, Mr. Gaspard?” Sergeant Yeager probed.

“No, my brother and
I haven’t spoken for years. I didn’t learn about this cult business until
tonight.”

Sergeant Yeager
nodded and then turned to John. “We’ll need to talk to him when he comes
around. I’ve got your statement. Thanks, Doc.” He looked over at Jean Marc. “We’ll
be in and out while your brother is here. If you think of anything, let us
know.” He quickly walked away.